The Coming of the American Behemoth. Michael Joseph Roberto

      3—The Spectacle of Prosperity and Necessity of Spin

      THE GREAT BOOM of the 1920s created a spectacle of prosperity based on America’s extraordinary capacities as the epicenter of the world capitalist system. Economic growth between 1922 and 1929 was unprecedented, at times breathtaking, and incessantly transformative. Much of what remained of traditional nineteenth-century American society was swept aside in a whirlwind of change. The once vital role of the petty-bourgeois merchant and small family farmer was fading into history. Capitalist innovation in the means of production seemed to ensure the promise of endless prosperity in the New Era. Mass production, urbanization, and the impact of the automobile and the radio were redoing the physical and mental landscape. Socially mobile Americans, especially those in the rising boomtowns, found pleasure in the swirl of products that seemingly made life more exciting and vivid. The dazzle of it all was reflected in a new obsession with fashions, sports, movies, music, and booze. The businessman was the new American hero, even Christ-like. There was so much ado in the constant movement of things and people that one could be easily lured by the mysterious powers of the commodity. As Marx and Engels first described the sweeping powers of industrial capitalism:

      Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that had conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.¹

      In 1920s America, the capitalist spell had become so intoxicating that millions of Americans believed they were living as individuals never had before. Many more held out the hope that their turn would come. Indeed, a new, more enjoyable lifestyle was enough to convince some that capitalism had changed in a revolutionary way by becoming what it was always supposed to be: democratic.

      But to sustain the boom required just the opposite. The First World War had turned the capitalist road into a highway. The partnership of government, business, and labor required for wartime production had expanded the force field within which capital could accumulate. State intervention into the private economy was welcomed by Big Business, making both even stronger in the postwar decade as a more powerful form of capitalist rule emerged. The requirements of capitalist accumulation only furthered the concentration of wealth and centralization of Big Business, its power expanding over the rest of society in ever-totalizing forms. From a capitalist state compelled to raise production and productivity to construct the war machine while still providing maximum profits to capitalists, the U.S. government became the manager for plutocracy that was making business all-powerful in its own right. The conscious aim of three Republican presidents was to promote a policy of laissez-faire in domestic and foreign policies that belied the potential might of a capitalist empire on the rise.

      The Great Boom established the basis for a belief in the possibility of abundance, endless prosperity, and the promise of a qualitative advance in material comfort for all Americans. Delivering it was another matter. The extraordinary development of technology and innovation in management caused the fixed component of constant capital, machinery, to rise at the expense of its variable constituent, labor. This meant that production would inevitably deliver far more goods than the mass of people could consume. Without any consideration of this and other contradictions, capitalist leadership quickly became convinced that prosperity required the selling of ideas as well as things. In the marketplace of the New Era, it became as important to constantly remind the consumer that he or she needed a new car, radio, household appliance, or mouthwash as it was to make any of them. While the creation of material abundance on a hitherto unknown scale was indeed a remarkable feat, the more enduring achievement of the American capitalists was the genesis of marketing as an industry unto itself. For the first time, capitalist development came to depend on the means and methods of persuasion and manipulation to sustain capitalist accumulation. In the American epicenter of world capitalism where abundance was the greatest and living standards were envied by the rest of the world, the mission of capital was not only to subject labor to its command but to extend its domination in the realm of mass consciousness. It is here where the market mentality prevailed, where consumerism triumphed over citizenship, and where non-terrorist fascist processes based on persuasion, deception, and manipulation aimed at the domination of capital itself were forged.

      When war erupted in Europe in 1914, America was considered a backward society by haughty Europeans of high culture. Jonathan Norton Leonard, a writer whose 1939 book Three Years Down offered a highly readable account of the worst years of the Great Depression, described the United States in 1914 as “large and rich” but “a provincial country and none too sure of itself.” Americans in pursuit of quality higher education and who wanted to become doctors, scientists, or philosophers went to German universities. “Paris ruled the elegancies,” while “‘the latest thing’ in every field was usually of European origin.” Before the First World War, Leonard wrote, Americans “were definitely importers of culture, not exporters of our own.” He added:

      Our technical progress was not much considered. Our movies, comic strips, popular music and fashions had not yet begun to Americanize the leisure moments of the world. Our financiers, except when they wanted to borrow money abroad, were completely wrapped up in domestic affairs. Our foreign policy, except for a habit of absent-minded felony toward Latin America, did not exist. Our navy was an expensive gesture and our army a small, hairy-chested farce.²

      The coming of the Great War changed all that as the United States became a global leader whose many powers seemed magical.

       THE FIRST WORLD WAR AND THE ORIGINS OF THE GREAT BOOM

      Of all the changes in the international capitalist order following the First World War, the most significant was the emergence of the United States as “the great creditor nation of the world.”³ This underscores what William Leuchtenburg, a highly respected American historian of the 1920s and 1930s, meant when he declared that America’s postwar global role was one “of those great shifts in power that occurs but rarely in the history of nations, a transition with formidable consequences.”⁴ Even before it entered the conflict in 1917, its massive economic potential, tapped by the needs of total war in Europe, had put it on that path. From 1914 to 1916, U.S. trade with the Allies rose from $825 million to $3.2 billion.⁵ By the time American troops arrived on the Western Front, total exports of U.S. merchandise to the Allies had reached $6.2 billion, about 11 percent of GNP.⁶ The more strategically placed enterprises reeled in the biggest catches; for example, United States Steel’s profits rose from $76 million in 1914 to $478 million in 1917.⁷ National income nearly doubled from 1914 to 1918, as living standards improved dramatically for millions of Americans employed in wartime production and services. The war also made America the world’s leading energy producer. By 1920, its 60 million tons of oil production was two-thirds of the world’s total.⁸

      Globally, America took a decisive step in ascending to the level of a preponderant economic power, making real President Woodrow Wilson’s desire for an active and engaging postwar U.S. foreign policy that would facilitate an “open door” for American goods around the world. The Marxist economist Lewis Corey in 1934 emphasized that the most important result of the war was America’s ascendance at the expense of its competitors. In 1919–1920, U.S. exports reached $16.1 billion, the highest to date; exports exceeded imports by almost $7 billion.⁹ Moreover, the United States, as the world’s new banker, exported more capital than ever before. By 1919, foreigners owed American investors almost $3 billion, not including the more than $10 billion the United States had lent foreign countries, mainly the Allies, to remain in the war.¹⁰ Indeed, when the fighting stopped, America was positioned to exert tremendous economic and political power throughout the world, though the “reluctant giant” failed to do so in the coming decades, at least to the degree required given its new global role.¹¹

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